Skiing within your budget
The ski industry often puts its worst foot forward, marketing-wise. What other industry has fixated its highest prices in the public imagination? by George Koch from Fall 2007 issue
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Brave new world
It was probably the most astounding performance in the history of the ski resort industry, indeed a remarkable entrepreneurial run by any business standard. Joe Houssian transformed a few modest commercial real estate investments into a world-spanning ski resort development and operating company, the most successful such venture in skiing’s history. Revered, occasionally reviled but regularly aped and copied, Houssian’s Intrawest Corp. changed the way the ski industry operates, challenging the mom-and-pop ski hills of the day to shape up or stand aside.
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Potholes still rule the West
Regular readers may remember my column nearly four years ago (SC, Spring 2002) comparing B.C.’s highways to those of a Third World country, and bemoaning the dolorous consequences for economic development, travelling safety and skiers reaching some of the province’s best mountains. Has much changed during the intervening period in B.C. or western Canada’s other big skiing province, Alberta? Even in the most optimistic light, the record is mixed. B.C. is upgrading a couple of important roads, while other arteries to ski country languish. Oil-and-natural-gas-royalty-fuelled Alberta has begun a belated orgy of paving—while ignoring numerous highway challenges.
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No more mumbo-Jumbo
When I first wrote about the Jumbo Glacier Resort proposal nearly 10 years ago, I never thought the end of a decade would still see me pondering the approval process for this fabulous ski area concept in B.C.’s Purcell Mountains. from November 2005 issue
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Holding Court at Castle
The 19th-century crackpot German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously observed that adversity, which didn’t kill him outright, only made him stronger. Going by that axiom, Castle Mountain Resort is the toughest mountain around. Over the past year southern Alberta’s freeride cult temple has suffered the dual calamities of a court ruling delaying the resort’s Haig Ridge development and a rain-induced mid-winter closure that drove down the mountain’s seasonal skier-visits by 75 per cent. That same bizarre wet weather affected many of Alberta’s and B.C.’s ski areas.
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Invasion of the Calgreedians
In certain social circles up and down the Rocky Mountain Trench, the long valley in southeastern B.C. that separates the Rockies from the Purcells, Selkirks and Monashees, they are known as "Calgreedians."
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Pot-holed to death in B.C.
Welfare kills. Do they have those patronizing commercials in the East, where a cop-voice warns "Speed Kills!"? I think the evidence is stronger that welfare kills, or at least an excessive government fixation with welfare. B.C., Canada's tourism playground, also has one of the worst road systems in North America. Bad, and deteriorating.
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